djweso's recipe for thought.

CHESAPEAKE — Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to power a television for three hours. That same can can be recycled over and over again.

It goes from your house to the blue curbside bin for pickup or you take it to a recycling center. From the blue bin, items head to TFC Recycling, not the landfill.

A loader picks up items and puts them on the processing line, where items that can’t be processed are sorted out.

“Some of the main offenders are your garden hoses and plastic bags that really jam up the equipment,” explains Ed Farmer, vice president of business development for TFC Recycling.

Machines automatically carry some items, like cardboard, forward while smaller items like cans and bottles fall to another sorting line. Optical sorters use cameras timed with air jets to identify small paper products and blow them out of the stream. The line gets more and more pure until mostly cans and bottles are left. Large magnets remove steel cans, leaving only plastic and aluminum ones. Magnets are again used, this time to create an eddy current that repels the aluminum cans into the aluminum bin and allows the plastic to fall in with the plastics. Just the aluminum goes up a conveyor belt and into a bailer, where it’s crushed for shipment and ready for a new life.

Well outside of the various nitpicks that can be done to both of those numbers, one big culprit is “underemployment”. We’ve been talking about underemployment a lot in The Real Recovery because I think it’s a more accurate measure of how many Americans have been affected by the recession. If you “get discouraged” and stop looking for a job, you no longer count as “unemployed”. Or, as we’re talking about this week: if you go freelance part time.

The official measure of underemployment is called the U-6 and the Bureau of Labor Statistics describes it in breathtaking terms:

Total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers

In October, when we saw that big 10.2% unemployment number, the U6 number was at 17.5% Nearly a fifth of the population!

You know what that does not include though? All the Americans who’ve taken pay cuts or reduced hours in the recession. (More digging through numbers to come).